What are wakelocks, how they affect the battery life of your Android device, and how to "Greenify" them

Have you ever gone to bed with your phone's battery well over 50% and woken up to find out that it has depleted overnight and the device has switched itself off? There are several causes for this abnormal behavior, and among the biggest culprits are the unwanted system wakelocks.



So, what exactly are these? Wakelocks are power-managing software mechanisms, which make sure that your Android device doesn't go into deep sleep (which is the state that you should strive for), because a given app needs to use your system resources. There are several types of wakelocks:

Normally, wakelocks shouldn't use a large amount of your system resources when you are not using your device, as it should be in a state of deep sleep. Although wakelocks on Android are not necessarily a bad thing, minimizing these should be the priority of any Android power user who's on the hunt for better battery life.



Unfortunately, some poorly-coded, malicious, or simply buggy apps might create an abnormal amount of undesirable wakelocks. Other apps require constant Internet access in order to operate in a normal fashion - Facebook and Messenger are probably the most popular representatives. They persistently request information from the web (the so-called "polling" for new events), which is causing subsequent wakelocks.



In other cases, an update to a given app can also cause certain issues, which usually result in partial wakelocks. The latter keep your CPU constantly humming in the background, sometimes without your knowledge, and prevent your device from "going to sleep". That's a pretty substantial prerequisite for anomalous battery drain. Thus, it is advisable to regularly monitor the wakelocks on your device and see which of your apps go harsh on our system's resources.



So, we'll show you the ropes on how to do this. First, we should find out what app or process might be causing these wakelocks.